Trump is promoting wrong GOP brand

If anything, experience seems to count against a candidate in the eyes of many GOP partisans.

The headline on Pew’s report was that only 19 percent of Americans say they can trust the federal government most of the time, one of the lowest levels in half a century. Trump has repeatedly issued the types of public statements that have been deemed gaffes, and proved fatal, in past campaigns. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us.

The two numbers are obviously connected.

They somehow might end up preferring Trump. Since the Paris attacks and the response from GOP candidates, many have pointed to parallels between Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and the way candidates are responding to extremist terrorism today. And those voters trust Trump over Hillary Clinton by nearly 2 to 1 to handle that challenge. But I think there’s more going on here than a freak show engineered by a highly skilled and experienced media mogul and manipulator. “They want to defeat ISIS”. We firmly believe the answer is no.

Now the racism becomes more overt – and still, he goes unchallenged. Next in line? Ben Carson at just 13.9 percent. “Generalities aren’t going to cut it anymore”, he said.

The New Jersey governor’s reply was a paean to pusillanimity. A Washington Post handicapper still predicts Sen. And step three is Rubio wins the nomination. Are you sure Republican voters are wrong there?

Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said Trump has dominated the GOP polls so far largely because he has attracted voters who are “intensely unhappy with political leadership”. Also, Trump’s track record in real estate lends credence to his claims that he knows how to manage money and create jobs, which he has promised to do for the country as he has for his companies.

American Encore, a 501(c)4 organization founded by political consultant and Koch brothers’ protégé Sean Noble, doled out the cash to run an ad in the Des Moines area that accuses Cruz of voting to “weaken national security” and tells him to stop “leading from behind”. “It’s no easy task for journalists to interrupt Mr. Trump with the facts, but it’s an important one”.

Statistician Nate Silver, in his FiveThirtyEight blog, uses a slightly different measure. That is a double edge sword because Trump appeals to a large portion of the Republican base, and they support Trump because they believe he is what the Republican brand should be. An accurate poll in Iowa, therefore, should list 80 percent as still undecided.

The New York Times also took a stand in a scathing editorial this week blasting what it calls Trump’s “racist lies” about Syrian refugees, comparing him to other unsavory politicians like Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace. “We have great people in the Muslim population but something’s happening”.

Moreover, Trump is employing illegal immigrants, through a third party, in the construction of his new hotel in Washington, D.C. If the Republicans want to expose the hypocrisies and inadequacies of a Trump campaign, they must call him out over his inconsistencies on immigration and explain why their plan (a path to citizenship in the case of Bush and Rubio) is preferable.